The Summer We Turned Green

by William Sutcliffe

  Mum ditches her panto-cheerfulness that evening, and we have a huge meal, talking over some of the more spectacular accidents and falls of the day, then turn in early.

  We spend the whole of the next day out on the water again, taking a ‘sea kayak safari’ around the coast to visit some caves. As we’re returning to our room, she suggests that we do something we’ve never done in all the years we’ve been coming here: go to the last night disco.

  At first I think she’s joking, but she isn’t. I tell her there’s no way I’m going, but she continues to persuade, cajole and beg as she changes into a slinky summer dress and starts to apply lipstick and eyeliner.

  She then pulls out a short-sleeved shirt from my suitcase, still unworn, which I think she must have put in there, and lays it out on her bed.

  ‘Pleeeeease,’ she says, stroking the shirt.

  With a sigh, I pull off my top and reach for the shirt. ‘Ten minutes,’ I say. ‘Max.’

  Mum grabs me and kisses me on the cheek, then returns with a tissue to wipe off the lipstick mark she’s left on my face.

  We head down to the hotel bar, where she orders a glass of wine for her and a fruit cocktail for me. It arrives with a frosting of sugar around the rim and a paper umbrella on top, and is simultaneously delicious and disgusting.

  We sit at a table next to the empty dance floor for a while, sipping our drinks, listening to the dreadful ’80s music, which is impossible to talk over.

  Every time a new song starts, Mum shouts, ‘I REMEMBER THIS ONE!’ at me, and I nod and smile, trying not to look as if I pity her for growing up in an era of such unbelievable cheese.

  When there are a few other people for cover, with my ten-minute deadline long passed, Mum drags me out to the middle of the floor and tries to make me dance with her. I stand there, not moving, frozen with embarrassment, but it’s such a relief to see her spring and zest back again, I don’t want to break the spell by walking away.

  So I stay put, making sure I don’t catch anyone’s eye, and shuffle from foot to foot in time to the music as a token gesture in the direction of dancing. Mum shimmies round me, sometimes inviting me to twirl and spin her, and for a moment our dance reminds me of being small, when Rose was at school, and Mum and I spent whole days just pottering around the house doing whatever came into our heads.

  If anyone I knew was watching there’s no way I’d let this happen, but here, away from everything, encouraged by Mum’s totally unembarrassed over-the-top moves, I feel my self-consciousness ebb away, and I slowly begin to move my limbs a little more, letting her take my hand when she reaches for it.

  Later, sweaty and content, we return to our seats. A slow song starts, filling the room with the high wail of a saxophone, and the dance floor transforms from a mass of flailing limbs to clumps of lumbering, swaying couples.

  We watch the slow dancers, and I notice that Mum’s face looks rigid, her smile frozen and stiff. I tell her I’m turning in, and she immediately says she’ll come too.

  In the lift up to the room, she thanks me and says she loves me, so I give her a swift hug, which I don’t enjoy at all, but sometimes you have to do these things.

  ‘I kept this for Rose,’ I say, pulling the paper umbrella out of my shirt pocket. ‘To show her what she missed.’

  ‘She’s going to be blown away,’ says Mum.

  When she’s in the bathroom, I send one last text home, and an answer from Dad pings back straight away. The demolition is looking imminent, but it hasn’t happened yet. Our flight is early tomorrow morning, so thankfully my holiday gamble has paid off. I haven’t missed the big day.

  * * *

  As soon as we get home, I head straight up to the treehouse. Sky, of course, is there, lying on her stomach with one arm curled around her sketchbook, drawing. She asks me all about the holiday, but I feel bad talking about it when she hasn’t been able to go anywhere, so I quickly change the subject to the protest and what has been happening while I was away.

  She tells me I haven’t missed much, but that a couple of police visits to the building site have been taken as a sign that the eviction attempt is probably imminent. Word has been put out, and all week more protesters have been arriving on the street.

  ‘Was it OK up here on your own?’ I ask her.

  ‘It was quiet,’ she says. ‘I’m pleased you’re back.’

  ‘Me too,’ I reply, but this feels like an awkward conversation, so I change the subject again by asking to see her picture.

  She hands over the sketchbook, which is open on a minutely detailed pencil drawing of the view from the treehouse, spread across two pages, complete with dangling branches in the foreground, a bird’s-eye view of my home and garden, the commune with its wigwam and totem pole and the street stretching away into the distance.

  ‘This is amazing,’ I say. ‘How long did it take?’

  She shrugs and looks away. I leaf back though the sketchbook, paging through sketch after sketch: one of a hand; one of a squirrel so lifelike that I can imagine it leaping off the page; then a whole series of tiny images of the tree we’re sitting in – leaves, twigs, bark, branches, light spearing through the canopy above – all of it so crisp on the page that the images look almost more real than the things themselves. Poring over Sky’s drawings, the miraculous three-dimensionality of them, I realise that her skill isn’t just the ability to do this with her hands, it’s that she notices details which to me are just a blur, and it’s these details that make a leaf a leaf, a branch a branch, a tree a tree. Those piercing eyes of hers really do see more than mine.

  ‘I wish I could do this,’ I say.

  ‘I’m sure you could. If you had enough time on your hands.’

  ‘I really couldn’t. Not if I had a hundred years and a million pencils.’

  Sky takes back her sketchbook, opens it to the page containing our view from the treehouse and continues to draw.

  ‘I should probably go and see my dad,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ she replies, not looking up.

  I head down the rope ladder, and inside the commune immediately feel that the atmosphere has changed. There are more people around, and a buzz of urgency seems to have filled the house. I sense the same tension you get just before a storm, a feeling of heavier-than-normal air, of slightly oppressive calm before an explosion of noise and energy.

  After a failed search of the house, I find Dad in the garden with Martha and a few others, making placards. He’s sawing and nailing, Martha is painting. A heap of finished signs is stacked by the fence, each with a different slogan, ranging from specific calls to save this street and cancel the airport expansion to more general ones saying things like ‘CLIMATE CHANGE ISN’T COOL’, ‘PLANE MADNESS’, ‘THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL’, ‘LEARN OR BURN’, ‘THERE’S NO PLANET B’ and ‘THIS IS A MELTDOWN’.

  ‘Hey! Luke!’ says Dad, dropping his tools and rushing towards me with hug-intent in his eyes, but I do a sidestep and put my hands in my pockets.

  ‘How was the holiday?’ he asks.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘That’s all you’ve got? One word?’

  ‘It was fun. You should have come.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  He tails off, lets out a nervous chuckle, and his eyes flick towards Martha, who abruptly turns away and pretends she isn’t listening.

  I didn’t plan this, but I now realise I have no desire to make this conversation easy or unembarrassing for him.

  ‘So … you had a good time?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah. Bit weird with just the two of us, but it was nice.’

  ‘And … how’s Mum?’

  ‘Fine. You can ask her yourself.’

  ‘I will. Soon. And it’s been all go here. Things are hotting up.’

  ‘Yeah. Sky told me.’

  ‘Er … do you want to help make some placards?’

  ‘OK.’

  Dad fetches a saw and hammer, directs me to a pile of wood and shows me what to do. I pitch in for a
while, then drift away to look for Rose so I can give her my gift. She’s in a meeting, of course, and just before I hand over the paper umbrella I suddenly lose confidence in the joke, finding myself unable to remember what was supposed to be funny about it, but I go ahead anyway. To my surprise, her response is, ‘Thanks! I love it!’ with a big smile, then she plants it in her hair.

  After telling her that Mum has a Toblerone the size of an arm to give her, I head back up to the treehouse, where Sky fills me in on the newly finalised plans for eviction day. She shows me an orange whistle hanging on a nail in the trunk of the tree, and says that if we see signs of demolition machinery moving in, or any kind of police manoeuvres towards the commune, we should give a minute of long blasts, and this will alert all the protesters on the street to immediately proceed to battle stations.

  A few other key people also have whistles, and if we’re not in the treehouse when we hear the signal, at any time of day or night, we should climb up to our lookout post as fast as possible and immediately raise the ladder.

  I lift the whistle off the nail and put it to my lips. ‘I really want to do it,’ I say.

  ‘Not yet,’ says Sky. ‘Not yet.’

  In the end it isn’t Sky and me who sound the alarm. We’re at home, asleep, when the whistle blows, and the first I know of demolition day arriving is when Sky runs into my room and shakes me awake.

  ‘Get up!’ she says. ‘It’s happening.’

  My groggy morning brain takes a while to understand what she’s talking about, but soon the sound of the whistle percolates through and wakes me up. I launch myself out of bed, into my clothes, and without pausing for food or even a glass of water we run out of the front door.

  I get an immediate sense of crowds rushing around in a purposeful, excited way, but don’t pause to look at who is going where until I’m safely up in the treehouse with Sky. Following our instructions, we pull the rope ladder after us and hook it over a high branch. Anyone who wants to force us down will have to be very good at climbing trees, or will need a crane.

  I grab Mum’s binoculars and scope the construction site to see what’s in store. The gates have been opened wide and a row of vans is pulling up, snaking beyond the end of the street and on round the corner, out of sight, so it’s impossible to see how many there are. As each one comes to a halt, the side door slides open and a team of ten or so men comes out, all wearing yellow jackets and hard hats. They’re not police, but they don’t seem like builders, either. All of them look young, and physically large. This must be the ‘private security’ we’ve heard people talking about, often with an edge of fear.

  There’s already a team of police surrounding the perimeter of the building site, arranged in a way that looks like they are there to protect the menacing security guards from us, the protesters, rather than the other way round.

  I hand the binoculars to Sky and call Clyde to tell him what I can see. He takes in all the information rapidly, thanks me and tells me to call again if I have any more news.

  Directly below us, the street is filling up with people. Even though it’s not long after dawn, everyone from the commune has already come outside, and most of them are engaged in shunting the homemade barricade from the front garden into the road. I don’t know where they found all the twisted metal and planks of wood it’s built from, but by the time the roadblock is in place, stretching across the tarmac from pavement to pavement, it looks pretty solid. A few final adjustments are made by Clyde himself, using his welding torch.

  Behind him the crowd begins to swell, mostly made up of people who have arrived in the last few days and filled up the remaining empty houses on the condemned side of the street. The most recent arrivals have ended up camping in front and back gardens, which has transformed the atmosphere of the whole street from suburban backwater to something that feels more like a festival.

  A topless, heavily tattooed guy with a big African drum strapped over his shoulders begins playing, pounding out a rhythm which drifts upwards to our treetop perch, his beats mixing with snatches of singing and chanting that emerge from different pockets of protesters. Soon after he starts, Space appears out of the house carrying his own slightly smaller drum, and joins in. It is more or less impossible to play any drum anywhere near the commune without Space appearing and joining in. Just a couple of taps on a tambourine and he’d be there.

  Then I notice Dad, directly underneath me, pressing his body against the tree trunk. Next to him is Martha, carrying a coil of chain. When Dad is satisfied with his position, Martha hands him one end, which he holds by his side, and she begins to walk round and round the tree, wrapping the chain around the trunk and my father, over his waist, legs, calves, then up around his stomach and chest. When the coil is finished, she picks up a padlock from the ground and fastens him into place. Martha holds out the key and they talk for a while, as if they can’t decide what to do with it, then she puts it in her back pocket.

  She checks the chains, pulling at them to make sure they’re secure and not too tight, and while she’s doing this, he says something that makes her laugh.

  ‘YO, DAD!’ I shout. ‘YOU OK!?’

  ‘AOK, BUDDY,’ he replies. ‘WHAT ABOUT YOU?’

  ‘COOL!’ I say, with a big wave and a matching grin.

  ‘I’D WAVE BACK IF I COULD,’ he says.

  ‘HE’S BEEN A VERY NAUGHTY BOY,’ says Martha.

  ‘SO I KEEP HEARING,’ I reply, which is a joke, and also not.

  ‘ANY MOVEMENT FROM THE PIGS?’ yells Dad.

  ‘NOT YET! THERE’S LOADS OF THEM THOUGH. AND SECURITY PEOPLE. IT’S ALL GOING TO KICK OFF!’

  ‘WE’RE READY!’ says Dad. ‘YOU’RE DOING A GREAT JOB!’

  ‘Look,’ says Sky, pointing across the street. ‘It’s that man! Your neighbour.’

  Sure enough, Callum’s dad, Laurence, looking like he’s dressed for a round of golf, is marching out of his house carrying not a set of golf clubs, but something that appears to be a large pot of glue.

  He’s greeted with cheers by a group of people outside the commune (which he seems to rather enjoy) and even a few hugs (which he’s not so sure about). A conversation ensues between him, Clyde and Sky’s mum, with the three of them pacing around the area of tarmac immediately behind the barricade.

  After a bit of slightly uncertain joking around, the lid is prised off the tin of glue and it’s poured out on to the ground in a stick man shape.

  Just as he’s about to lie down, Helena appears at a run from her house. I’ve never seen her run before, and she runs about as well as a seal walks.

  I can’t hear what’s being said, but she clearly isn’t encouraging him to carry on.

  With barely a word of response to his irate wife, Laurence lies down flat on his back in the puddle of glue.

  A huge cheer rises up, which Sky and I join in with.

  Helena remonstrates a little longer with her husband and with the people who are cheering him on, but this only seems to make people laugh at her, and she soon retreats angrily back home.

  ‘If you’re not happy, write to your MP,’ Sky’s mum shouts after her.

  As she goes into the house, I spot Callum peering at the street through the hall window, either forbidden from coming outside to see what’s happening or too afraid. I wish he could see me up here, right at the heart of things, while he cowers at home with his mummy. Part of me wants to text him, asking who’s the tough guy now, but I decide that would be petty.

  The sound of a large engine roaring to life, followed by the scrape and clank of caterpillar tracks against tarmac suddenly diverts everyone’s attention away from Helena’s tantrum. Flanked by police, a bulldozer begins to inch out of the building site, heading directly towards the crowd.

  The drumming and chanting rise in volume, and a stream of protesters surges in the direction of the barricade, swarming all over it like insects, making a human shield that spreads from one side of the road to the other.

  The bulldo
zer keeps approaching, getting closer and closer, louder and louder, not even slowing down, as if the driver hasn’t seen the mound of human flesh that lies in its path, or, more likely, as if he’s trying to intimidate the protesters into backing down.

  Nobody retreats. Most of them respond by beginning to dance and sing on the barricade. If they’re frightened, which they ought to be, it doesn’t show.

  Time seems to slow down as the distance between the bulldozer and the dancing protesters closes, but at the last second before metal grinds into flesh, the machine comes to a stop and lets out a noisy sigh as the engine sputters out.

  A raucous cheer rises up. A girl wearing rainbow shorts and a white vest top descends from the barricade and places a single flower inside the coffin-sized scoop of the bulldozer.

  As she tries to climb back on to the barricade, a pair of security men dive forward and grab her by the ankles. A couple of her friends take her arms from above and a human tug of war begins, which keeps going as a piercing scream rips through the air. Two policemen waving truncheons come forward and mount the barricade. Their slashing swipes cause a quick retreat as a pocket of protesters step back to escape broken arms or cracked skulls, and within seconds the rainbow shorts girl is lifted up and carried away.

  A wave of fear at this sudden flurry of violence seems to spread across the front rank of the protesters. Then they remember their strategy, and everyone who is still on the barricade lies down. The police now move forward and form a line in front of the bulldozer. For a while there’s a tense stalemate, then the police clamber on to the barricade and start the cumbersome process of lifting the limp protesters down and carrying them to the waiting vans. Nobody fights back or resists arrest, but I can see how within the parameters of non-violence they are making it as hard as possible for the police. With at least four policemen needed for every arrest, clearing the barricade is a slow process, which, because of the continued singing and the celebratory atmosphere, certainly doesn’t look like a defeat or even an annoyance for the people who are being arrested. It doesn’t even look like a punishment. If anyone is having an unhappy time, it looks like it’s the police.